 In this module, we are going to look at the traditional perspective of the telecommunication world, how it has evolved over time in terms of the service provisioning. We'd look at the pattern of this evolution from the perspective of the technology itself, the regulatory aspects on how the standardization bodies and the governments controlled it, and how did each technology make its own niche and created a user base. In all, we can summarize the phases over which the telecommunication market evolved in the traditional sense. We'd look at the first and foremost phase, that is the telephone exchanges actually evolved from being mechanical to electrical to automated and eventually automatic. These days, we just assume that we are going to interact with telecommunication systems which are digital. But this didn't happen overnight. It was a transition from the analog systems to the digital across a wide range of steps and hardware. We'd also look at the important phase in which the public switched telephone networks, that is, PTCL kind of network from which a landline is initiated, and how did it eventually merge with the public land mobile network, that is, mobile communications such as mobile ink, wired, you phone, etc. So these two networks actually integrated into one. It's a very important phase and we've witnessed it over the last 10, 15 years. We are living in an era where we are actually witnessing the convergence of services which were inherent to the telecommunications and which have always been marked by the internet connectivity such as the World Wide Web, the internet surfing, the chatting over IP such as Microsoft Relay Chat and VoiceOver IP. So we'd see that phase where these two services have converged into a unified platform and what are the issues that the world sees in them. Now, if we look at the telecommunication segments, we can broadly categorize them on the basis of the market which existed and surely that was determined by the need. For instance, telephony was initially thought of as landline-based phones which were predominantly fixed. Each household was expected to have at least a landline telephone. This terminology of having a certain percentage of users having landline telephone is called tele-density. Then we also witnessed that these telephones were required to be mobile in order to satisfy users on the go. That led to the emergence of mobile communications or mobile telephony. Then there's a market which indeed existed in parallel to the telephony. Of course, it came late. That was to provide basic internet services such as browsing, email and other similar applications. In order to provide the internet service, initially it was provided in the form of dial-up modem based internet connectivity to the household. For the corporate clients, it was thought to give them relatively high data rates 24-7. For instance, if the dial-up modems would get 56 kilobits per second, the corporate users are going to have a connectivity of at least 128 kilobits per second. This was termed as fixed broadband which was offered in the form of either DSL or packet cable networks. Then we have also seen the emergence of mobile broadband, the LTE that we talk about these days. How did these telecom segments emerge and necessitate that they should all be integrated into one? Let's look at the perspective of the telecommunication evolution in a chronological manner. Starting from the end of the 20th century and somewhere at the start of the 21st century, we see that the technologies actually started to compete with each other. As you can see, the fixed telephone lines were really limited in terms of their outreach and clientele. After all, if a household has a certain telephone line, it may not opt for the second one. So, resultantly, the mobile telephone subscriptions had to increase. For instance, in Pakistan, the current expected user base is around 60-65% which is based on mobile subscriptions. Compare it to the number of telephones which are available in each household. There's a remarkable difference. If you look at the number of users for internet, they've also grown exponentially. But this exponential rise has actually been affected by the availability of mobile phones which also have internet connection. So, if we look at the internet connectivity from traditional viewpoints such as the Dial-up Modems or the DSL, we don't see it to be rising that high. But instead, the mobile telephone subscriptions have tremendously increased which also contain internet connectivity such as 3G, 4G and the LTE. Now, this retail-based user base is so well-dominating over the corporate customers or the non-retail customers that we see that there is a growing percentage of the population that uses mobile phones and the number of users which are using either fixed or mobile broadband has come to a stall.